It’s a memory that brand-new Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust executive director Theron Shaw reflects on as he prepares for his new role.

In an interview, Shaw recalled his family’s Ohio farm, where he made fond memories as a child visiting his grandparents, camping and roasting sweetcorn over the fire. The farm holds deep meaning to him and his family, and helped foster a respect for taking care of the land.

But many years later, Shaw appreciates those recollections with a more nuanced eye — catching “the blind spots” his family had about their relationship with that Ohio farm and their pride in maintaining it.

“There’s a sense of our family having stewarded that land for four, five generations … which is a tiny little slice of time, when you think of the Indigenous people who lived on and cared for that land for millennia,” Shaw said.

The treaties that removed those Indigenous people from their land in Ohio, in the early 1800s, are a story “that we conveniently leave out of our history books,” Shaw said.

But it’s those kinds of stories — and conversations — about land and the people who have stewarded it, that will drive his work leading the Land Trust, said Shaw, who formally introduced himself to the organization’s community on March 1 during an open-house event at the Land Trust building.

He takes over the leadership position from interim executive director Elizabeth Lunney, who herself took that role early last year after the departure of former executive director Kate Riley.

“We owe (Lunney) a huge debt of gratitude for the work she did to get us to the point where we could attract someone of Theron’s caliber,” Land Trust board president Sara Van Fleet said in an interview.

Van Fleet also credited board member Mary Fran Lyons, who headed the search committee, for helping the organization seal the deal with Shaw.

During the March open house, Shaw regaled the crowd with a query he posed recently to Land Trust folks: If the Land Trust were a salmon, what stage of life would it be in?

He got many answers, but Shaw said the average response was that the Land Trust was mid-lifecycle. In fish parlance, that means the organization has graduated from the rivers and estuaries of its childhood, and is now maturing in the wide open sea — a time full of opportunity.

Shaw said he plans to spend the next year talking with the Land Trust and the community about those opportunities, with a particular interest in relationship-building with Indigenous people, addressing climate change and considering the long-term, sophisticated questions of conserving the trust’s properties.

“Whatever is next, wherever the salmon is headed, it’ll be about deepening our relationships to the land and to each other,” Shaw said at the open house.

The Land Trust successfully preserved, and prevented development over, many of the most important natural parts of the island in its youth, preserving crucial wildlife habitat, said conservation director Tom Dean, who served as the Land Trust’s executive Director from 2003 through the end of 2020.

That work expanded to providing public access, then into its work at Matsuda Farm, and now has matured into a “bigger conversation” about land access and the community’s relationship with the land, Dean said.

“And I hear Theron pushing that conversation to the next step — like, what is our relationship to Indigenous people who never gave up their rights to use this land?” Dean said. “And what does our food economy look like on Vashon?”

After all: “We’re dealing with trees that have a potential lifespan of 200 to 500 years,” Dean said. “So that’s just how we think.”

Shaw’s undergraduate education was in International Development at Miami University and he further earned a Masters of Planning from the University of Minnesota. He has built a career over the last 25 years or so in aiding nonprofits and other organizations — from the environmental to the educational and social services.

He previously lived on the island from 2010 to 2017, working as a consultant. The Land Trust was one of his clients.

In 2017, he took on his most recent role as the senior philanthropic advisor and campaign director at Pearson College in Vancouver, British Columbia. In that role, he witnessed Canadian work around reconciliation with Indigenous people — including the re-negotiating of modern treaties and bringing elders into public schools.

What he learned from those conversations, and his own work with Indigenous groups, informs his own thinking about stewardship, Shaw said.

In his personal life, Shaw enjoys collecting and playing flutes. He kept bees while on the island but had to leave the hives behind when he moved in 2017 — he said he looks forward to repopulating his bees.

Shaw’s two children were born on Vashon, and he returns to the island with them and his wife. He is also joined at the Land Trust by his 14-year-old deaf rescue dog, Bear.

Shaw describes himself as a strategy-minded “convener” — someone who can put together the good ideas of many people in a room into an achievable vision.

“It always feels like a great privilege just to sit alongside somebody who has a dream,” Shaw said, “and try to help bring that dream to life. … I feel like that’s what I’ve been up to my whole professional life … and that’s what has felt exciting to me about this role.”

Van Fleet, who served on the committee that ultimately selected Shaw, concurred. (Van Fleet said she will soon step into the role of past president on the board, and she specified that she doesn’t claim to speak for the entire board.)

“We’ve been doing things kind of the same way for 30 years, and this does really, for me, feel like this exciting new chapter for us — not just with Theron’s arrival, but (also) where (Lunney) helped bring us all,” Van Fleet said.

The search for a new executive director formally began in September, Van Fleet said, and “from the very start,” Shaw’s application to the organization showed that “he got us.”

“That really impressed me, from the start,” Van Fleet said. “He understands the big picture. He has great vision. He’s an incredible listener … He’s always thinking … putting all the parts together, and seeing how things might interact.”